Footage of Aaron Alexis during U.S. Navy Yard shooting. Image courtesy U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation

U.S. Investigations Services (USIS), the company that signed off on a background check into Aaron Alexis, the military contractor who shot 12 people dead on a U.S. Navy base in Washington DC last week, has a record of rushing investigations, according to a number of former employees.

Alexis was employed to do maintenance on the Navy Marine Corps intranet network by The Experts, a subsidiary of HP Enterprise Services. He had a “secret” level clearance which is obtained after a routine investigation is conducted into any criminal history. The clearance allowed him to work on classified military systems.

The background check on Alexis was conducted by USIS under a five year $2.45 billion contract to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) that the company won in 2011. Today USIS conducts 45 percent of OPM’s background checks – over 700,000 a year. The company also has a five-year contract worth up to $288 million to provide support services for OPM.

In response to the probe, USIS has fired a dozen managers in its quality review office in Pennsylvania as well as two senior executives - a division president and the chief financial officer. The executives were fired for a tactic called “flushing” which the newspaper described as cutting “corners to boost its processing of background checks” in order to meet monthly quotas.

At a U.S. Congressional hearing this past June into the quality of background checks, the OPM inspector general cited the case of Ramon Davila, a former USIS investigator who pled guilty in August to filing reports of interviews he did not conduct.

USIS has also been sued by two former employees in California who allege that the company did not give them enough time to conduct investigations.

The second lawsuit was filed by Tom Wilson in January 2013 after he was fired by the company in May 2012. Wilson alleges in his suit that the USIS “routinely and illegally assigned [him] ... cases, tasks, and duties, and deliberate set completion time requirements and limitations inconsistent with the performance of those tasks according to published company and United States Government policy, and then restricted the number of overtime hours the Employer would pay, thus forcing [him] to work without pay, under threat of termination.”

“If I had three months to check this person out . . . I’d be doing a more-thorough process,” a former employee told the newspaper. “When you’re giving me a week to interview 50 people, that’s impossible.”

USIS staff have also been accused of lax security. “People were leaving their laptops at Starbucks,” a former investigator told the Post. “People were leaving cases on top of their cars, information blowing off. We had a lady that left her files at Chuck E. Cheese with her kids.”History of USIS

In 1996, the Clinton administration privatized the Investigations Service - purportedly to save money - and sold it for $545 million to the Carlyle Group and the New York investment firm of Welsh, Carson, Anderson, and Stowe. The move was controversial at the time - Deborah Abraham Apperson, an OPM employee, testified against it in the U.S. Congress. “Who among us is willing to take the risk of letting a Timothy McVeigh [the Oklahoma City bomber] ‘slip through the cracks’ in order to save a few dollars by cutting corners?” she said.

For the first 11 years of its existence as a private company USIS was owned by the Carlyle Group. In May 2007 USIS was sold again to Providence Equity Partners (PEP) for $1.5 billion. The Rhode Island private equity group specializes in media, entertainment and communications companies.

USIS also has other government contracts that have been controversial. In May 2004 the U.S. government contracted with USIS to train a special police force in Iraq “to respond to national-level law enforcement emergencies.” The contractors ran four-week trainings to teach Iraqis who to deal with “terrorist incidents, kidnappings, hostage negotiations, explosive ordnance, high-risk searches, high-risk assets (and) weapons of mass destruction.” (See CorpWatch’s 2007 profile of this contract here)